The PropertyList is the new property introduced in EPiServer 9. It allows to use generic list on content model. List item property could be described with the same attributes as regular model properties. For example if we annotate property with Display attribute and set name, then name will be used as grid column header and as a label on the edit form. If we set the UiHint, like StringList then editing form will use selected editor. (more…)

EPiServer has a builtin Content References list property which is used to collect list of pages, blocks, or media. To add new reference, editor could D&D content or click Browse. Clicking Browse button will show dialog with content tree. (more…)

ContentArea property has builtin functionality of limiting content types that could be used in the editor. It’s implemented with AllowedTypes attribute. The attribute should be placed on the model and list all of available types. (more…)

Our customer editors very often use Compare Versions functionality. The CMS has workflows enabled, so when editor change the content, he need to mark it as Ready to publish. Then one of the supervisor using Tasks list gadget will approve or reject the changes. There are many editors and just few supervisors. They daily have a lot of items to approve. And usually those are really minor changes like single word, comma or typo was corrected. (more…)

Our customer editors complained that they have problems with using drag and drop functionality of ContentArea. They quite often use Remote Desktop connection to access the edit mode. The placeholder for ContentArea dragged element is relatively small. With the combination of RDP display lags makes using this feature difficult.

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Few months ago I prepared ContentArea property with image thumbnails and image preview support. The new EPiServer has Content References list property which already implements thumbnails for list items. In Content references list with preview property I tried to extend standard editor and add support for image preview as well. (more…)

The “Display Options” is a global settings list defined in DisplayOptions service. It’s used together with ContentArea property to set the layout for the content items. Sometimes editor should not be able to set options on each ContentArea because in some cases they might not be used in the template implementation. Last week I prepared a code for hiding Display Options for specific ContentAreas.

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Probably in every EPiServer project there will be a need to store a list of links to your content pages. EPiServer.CMS.UI 8.6.0 introduced a new multiple ContentReference property. Usually we could use a single property to store a collection of links. For example when building a media slideshow or when displaying links in a site footer. Using EPiServer there are several possibilities of implementation. Until now there were two built-in properties – ContentArea and LinkItemCollection, and the new multiple ContentReference is yet another interesting solution. I’ll try to compare those properties.

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As we know EPiServer edit mode components, both built-in and custom, are implemented in a modular way. It means that they are isolated to each other. Yet when developing new features sometimes there is a need of creating dependencies between the widgets. It’s necessary when changing state of one widget should affect state of another one. For example when our component depends on current context. When editor selects a node from three structure the component should be notified about this event and take a proper action. (more…)

I prepared a small improvement for Content Selector property. Standard property is a label displaying selected content name and a button used to selecting a content.

After editor selects an item it’s hard to determinate the ID of the selected content. To do this you need to open the content tree dialog once again, hover over selected tree node and check the tool-tip value. You may copy ID, replace it in the browser URL and edit the page… It’s really time consuming. (more…)